When Rupert Murdoch said the other day that he wasn’t investing in newspapers anymore, we assumed that he was being ironic, especially as it came in the same telephone conference call with News Corp analysts and reporters in which he said that he thought his agreement to buy Newsday from Tribune Co was all but sewn up .

Tribune Co under Chief Executive Sam Zell has really loosened up in the past few weeks. Just think back to the April 1 Web site “redesign,” not to mention this subsequent so-crazy-it-was-surreal press release.

Tribune Co earned the scorn of its smoking employees when it decided to charge them $100 more than their non-smoking brethren for health insurance. That was before Sam Zell took over, however. Here’s the memo that went out to employees today.

Google suprised the market with better than expected quarterly results despite worries that it was being hit by economic weakness after comScore data showed it having trouble converting Web search into ad viewer. Google CEO Eric Schmidt even went as far as to say the company would still perform well for the whole year “regardless of the business environment.” For investors, the results wiped away fears that Google was just as vulnerable as any company to recession fears and, as of this morning, company shares were up more than $80.

Sam Zell has a new round of ideas for how to fix Tribune. Read on for details. (Check Tribune’s temporarily redesigned Web site too, and remember: if you give people puppies, you can pay for Iraq coverage.)

Sam Zell in his latest memo tells Tribune employees — the ones who haven’t been spiked — that he’s happy to see them so hard at work coming up with new ideas to help the publisher and broadcaster thrive. Employees have been so helpful, in fact, that Tribune has created an online “IdeaBank” for submissions, rather than the talktoSam AT tribune.com address that he’s been using. As he explains below, this will let other people in the company see them.

Tribune Co.’s new owner, billionaire and orator nonpareil Sam Zell, let Chicago Tribune intern Katie Hamilton know exactly what he thought about her recent prank on rival paper the Chicago Sun-Times — one that has produced its fair share of chatter in the Windy City.

Monday brings a fresh wave of despair to the newspaper world as sagacious authors in various media outlets let us know that the economy and the neglect of good citizens are threatening the survival of print journalism.